The Persian Gulf

The Bronze Age Gulf functioned as a sophisticated commercial superhighway, facilitating extensive maritime exchange between Mesopotamian cities like Ur and Babylon and distant regions including the Indus Valley and Oman. This network relied heavily on strategic waystations like Dilmun, located on modern-day Bahrain, which emerged as a central middleman following the collapse of the Ur III state. Archaeological findings, such as bun-shaped copper ingots and evidence of large-scale textile production, reveal the economic scale of this trade, while the availability of freshwater springs dictated settlement patterns across the arid landscape. Dr. Steffen Laursen and Dr. Lloyd Weeks highlight how these interconnected societies demonstrated resilience and adaptation, managing complex logistics and bureaucratic trade records despite the absence of a singular, uniform collapse across the region at the end of the Bronze Age.